Author: Stephaine Larsson

Now that the Nokia-Microsoft partnership is official and both Nokia and Microsoft are trying to cope up with the competition being offered by Google and Apple, arises the question, who benefited the most from the partnership. Apparently, it seems like Microsoft is the bigger beneficiary when compared to Nokia. Why? It is rather simple to answer. Nokia has let go off its phone OS Symbian and has embraced Windows as its new phone OS. For doing this, it has to pay an unknown number of billions to Microsoft for allowing the use of Windows on Nokia phones along with paying some hefty royalties to Microsoft.

Following the announcement of the partnership, Nokia’s stocks slid by 14 percent. Under the pressure of the current situation, Nokia is planning to release its first Windows based handset by the end of this year. The once king of mobile technologies is indeed going through a tough time.

After all the rumors and the reports of the inside sources, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play has been officially launched yesterday at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The Sony Xperia Play, the first ever smartphone to be certified by Sony Playstation is based on Android 2.3, also known as Gingerbread. Xperia Play comes with the Playstation Suite that would allow users to access Playstation content on the phones. Also, the phone runs on Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor.

Other features of the phone include a multi-touch display screen which would slide to reveal the gaming controls that include a touchpad, directional pad and the typical Sony select buttons. The smartphone would enable 3D gaming at 60 fps and 50 new games from 20 publishers are going to be released for the phone along with the older classics.

Android’s growing popularity is making everyone design products for the OS now. Adobe is planning to do a mobile compatible flash player for Android 3.0 based tablets. Flash Player 10.2 – the mobile version of the flash will be integrated into the hardware allowing it to decode the video which would save the battery power by a fair margin when compared to the software doing the decoding.

Also, Blackberry devices are also expected to get the Flash Player 10.2. At the moment, the version is being tested intensively on the Motorola Xoom, various other netbooks and the Blackberry PlayBook. As of now, this version of the flash is going to be released for the above mentioned devices, while the other devices have some compatibility issues which will be dealt with accordingly.

Adobe has already mentioned that Android users across the world have downloaded the flash version for their devices 20 million times in the six months after the launch.

The Mobile World Congress has finally kicked off. On the first day at the MWC in Barcelona, the South Korean giant Samsung and the Japanese giant Sony showcased their range of new smartphones and tablet devices based on Google’s Android OS. While Samsung showcased its Galaxy S smartphone and the next generation Galaxy Tab tablet, Sony Ericsson unveiled its Xperia Play – the playstation induced mobile phone. Sony is also planning to ship the new gaming handsets soon.

The MWC which is going to last two more days is going to see many more mobile products in the next couple of days with the like of RIM, Motorola and HTC eagerly waiting to unleash their products. No doubt, Android is the leading phone OS in the world right now and it is topping every other OS at the moment by some margin. But, Apple’s products are in the waiting and anything can happen.

The Samsung Galaxy Indulge, the new smartphone from Samsung which supports the latest 4G-LTE feature is being released by Samsung through MetroPCS. This new smartphone would be an extension to Samsung Craft that was released last year. Indulge apparently possesses several multimedia oriented features that is sure to keep its users indulged into it. Along with multimedia, the phone also comes with several other features like oraganisational tools and various entertainments. Despite possessing so many features, the phone runs at lightning speed, thanks to its 1GHz Hummingbird processor. Also, the 4G-LTE service that is going to be provided by MetroPCS is ure to improve the browsing experience of users.

The smartphone which was launched a couple of days ago, runs on Android 2.2, possesses a 3.5 inches HVGA screen, a 3.0 megapixel camera along with the alrerady mentioned Samsung’s Hummingbird processor.

We all know about the Nokia-Microsoft partnership that happened yesterday. Now, if rumors are to be believed, Nokia is also planning to tie-up with Google and use the support of their phone OS Android. This news comes from Elder Murtazin, the chief analyst of Mobile-Review.com. “Inside sources have reported that Nokia is also planning to cut a deal with Google”, said Murtazin. Murtazin has also tweeted that the first Android based Nokia phones are due for a 2012 market release.

We already know that Nokia has let go of its own phone OS Symbian and from now on their mobile phone solutions are going to be based on Microsoft’s Windows. With Android stepping into the scene as well, we can now be sure that Symbian is gone forever and we won’t be seeing the two hands shaking on Nokia’s start-up screens any more.

Apple MacBook Air which runs on a Core 2 Duo processor is set for a revamp on its processor’s front. According to reports, Apple is going to use the Sandy Bridge Intel processors in its next MacBook Air models. Intel has resolved its issues with the Sandy Bridge chips which apparently were causing problems to SATA drives (hard disks and DVD drives) due to a defect in the component named Cougar of the chipsets. Now that the issue has been resolved, Intel is planning to start shipping the chipsets which should get all the companies back on track with regards to their production.

Apple MacBook Air which was updated in October last year would add a lot more to its processor speed if it were to make use of the Sandy Bridge chipsets. What the MacBook Air possesses in its looks, it lacks in its performance and the addition of the new Intel chipset should solve this problem now.

The Twitter app 2.0 for android based phones has been released. The new Twitter app 2.0 just comes in the wake of time as all the Android users up to now have been using third party applications that gave them options like Twidroid and Tweetdeck for staying updated. But, these third party applications were no good and twitter has realised the importance of having their own App and have released the new app 2.0.

This new app loads faster, is bug free, possesses a new user interface (UI) and also allows a smooth scroll allowing users to browse through various columns within the app. The swipe left and right options are present for both retweeting and replying to a tweet. Along with these cool updates, Twitter has also included autofill which would deal away with the various typing difficulties.

If rumors are to be believed, RIM is looking to implement Google’s Android apps on its Playbook, the new Blackberry tablet from RIM. According to reports, RIM, with the help of an in-built software is looking to run the 130,000 Android Apps on its upcoming tablet. The android App support for the Playbook is expected to be ready by this year’s second half.

But, RIM is a bit apprehensive about implementing it at the same time as it fears legal obligations from Oracle if it were to use the Android’s Dalvik Virtual Machine that powers the Android 3.0 tablets. But, right now there is nothing official about this move either from RIM nor Google.

But, if RIM were to seek Goolge’s help in this regards, Google would be more than happy to extend their App store on to the Blackberry tablets as well. But, where does this leave Blackberry store?

All the pre-release hype of the iPhone 4 on Verizon and the staggering business that trade analysts were predicting it to do has actually come off the boil a bit. Apparently, the Verizon iPhone 4 is doing good but nothing close to the spectacular pre-order sales that were being predicted. Analysts are saying that the queues outside stores in Chicago, Miami, Boston, Los Angeles or New York are smaller when to compared to the queues one got to see outside AT&T stores during summer last year. Although, most stores have reported that the demand for the phones is still steady and and they are expecting to display the “out of stock” board by the end of the day.

Or the lessened queues could be due to the staggering number of pre-ordered sales that one got to saw last week.